The Deading

Summary

Unnatural horrors and a town in peril: Stephen King’s Under the Dome meets The Last of Us in this harrowing climate fiction novel.

When a hidden evil emerges from the depths of the ocean, the tight-knit town of Baywood is caught in a climate disaster of mysterious origins: an unusual wave of sea snails enter the estuary and transform wildlife, seascapes, and finally, people.

Once infected, residents start “deading”: collapsing and dying, only to resurrect, changed in ways both physical and fundamental. After the government isolates Baywood, paranoia and surveillance run rampant. A newly formed cult called the Risers starts targeting those who are not deading: the introverted bird-loving Blas, his jaded older brother, Chango, the widow Kumi, and her cautious neighbor, Ingram. The survivors of Baywood eventually must choose to escape, to investigate the deading’s origins, or to become subsumed by this terrifying new normal.

At points claustrophobic and haunting, soulful and melancholic, The Deading lyrically explores the disintegration of society, the horror of survival and adaptation, and the unexpected solace found through connections in nature and between humans.

“I love horror, especially when it’s smart, disturbing, and very it-can-so-happen-here. And something unsettling IS absolutely happening: ecological terror and sci-fi, cults, paranoia. With prose as precise and dazzling as a diamond, The Deading is a masterwork.”—Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You